Has your business been left behind by your competitors? Has a lack of cash flow made it harder to invest and expand to bring your company practices up to date?

Here are some tips on how to update your business and bring it into the 21^st century, where it belongs.

Take note of areas for improvement

Make a note of all the things that you feel your business has fallen behind on and what you think you need to do to update it. Write down estimates of time or cost that will be needed to update each area. Then prioritise them and concentrate on one at a time.

Start a blog

Hopefully you’ve already got a website. One way to jazz it up a bit is to start a blog. Everyone else is blogging and it helps out with your search engine rankings and traffic.

Blog about your industry and offer free and friendly advice. Potential customers will then regard you as an expert in your industry and you’re more likely to stand out in their mind if they’re in need of your products or services.

Join the cloud

The cloud is on the rise and everyone’s in it in some way. Whether it’s cloud storage or bookkeeping, the cloud can help you save time and money in your business. It also makes it easier to offer flexible or remote working.

Offer flexible working

If at all possible, try to introduce flexible working schemes at your business. Workers can now submit applications to ask for flexible work and you will have to consider them and give a good reason for turning them down.

More companies are offering it nowadays with a great focus on achieving the perfect work-life balance. It keeps your workers happy and more productive as well as helping with staff retention.

Develop an online marketing system

If you’re not already using the online world as part of your marketing strategy then start doing it ASAP. In order to compete with other brands, you need to be in the online marketplace. Get online with a decent website, a blog and social media accounts.

Hire a small team to take care of your marketing in house or outsource it to a digital marketing agency.

Hire freelancers

If you can’t afford to hire full-time staff, then think about hiring freelancers. You could hire freelancers just to help out when it’s busy or to do odd jobs like designing your website and logos. Or you could hire them on a regular basis to deal with online marketing, copywriting, blogging or social media management.

The online freelancer marketplace is growing so you’ll find someone who suits your business needs fairly quickly.

Update your tax system

If you’ve been relying on an old fashioned system to do your taxes, you’re going to have to update pretty soon. The government’s Making Tax Digital scheme aims for everyone to submit their financial records online every quarter.

The scheme has been delayed as experts have advised that this scheme will be much harder and expensive for businesses who aren’t used to doing their taxes digitally. However, we’d recommend that you update the way you do tax as soon as you can to be prepared.

Are you trying to update your business? What’s your main focus? Let us know what you think.

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About The Author

Kara Copple

An experienced business and finance writer, sometimes moonlighting as a fiction writer and blogger.

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